Escudella

It's not the escudella (a traditional Catalan stew) that will send the scales soaring after the holidays. Nor is it the wine or sparkling beverages chosen to accompany it. What hurts more is the finger food at the company dinner or the office aperitif, where nothing is lacking. A escudella, a roast, some cannelloni are healthy, hearty, and comforting dishes, the kind that, once eaten, make you want to do what used to be called: "Stretch your legs."

The broth isn't expensive to make, and you can use the meat, or any leftover roast meat, for the filling for the cannelloni. Everyone who tries the broth likes it. You can't say no. It's like xarel·lo wine, like the handkerchiefs used for making bundles, like the tenora grape: exquisitely fine and rustic at the same time. Elegant and coarse, delicate and rugged, to be eaten from an escudilla (the earthenware bowl in which the soup that takes its name is served) or from a Pordamsa plate. To slurp and twist with your sleeve, or to delicately sip from the silver spoon, with lips half-closed.

The broth perfumes the house (it escapes from the kitchen and rises upwards, through the stairwell when you open the door) hours before lunch. Of all the dishes I know, it's the only one capable of warming the soul, and any other citizen from any other region could refute this, because soups are made everywhere and everyone thinks theirs is the best. "He who eats soup thinks everything through," the grandparents used to say, those who didn't make soup. scrollThey meant yes, soup was food for the brain, for physical work or intellectual work (pruning vines is intellectual).

We had dinner in the sense of eating soup. We made room for the cooks, congratulate them when they complain about the hours they've been working and that their hair will be ruined. Come on, let's go Find the recipe in NOW And we're going to buy "to make broth." Let's get out the pretty glasses. We celebrate that we have someone, anyone, who calls us by our nicknames. We let the grumps grumble. How many more times is this going to happen? Six? Seven? Eight? Three?